Vietnam and the American Political Tradition
Author: Randall B. Woods
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003-02-24
Total Pages: 340
ISBN-13: 9780521010009
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Marching on Washington
Author: Lucy G. Barber
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2004-04-05
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 0520242157
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Beautifully written. Lucy G. Barber has taken different stories and woven them together so that each builds into a larger narrative about the history of political protest. By looking across a series of marches, Barber explores issues that escape more focused studies, such as the development of marching on Washington as a political strategy, and the changing conception of Washington as a public space. The scope of the research and the author's craft in telling these stories sheds new light on important moments in American history."—Mary L. Dudziak, author of Cold War Civil Rights
Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
Author: Howard Bruce Franklin
Publisher:
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWritten by a cultural historian, this text offers a wide-ranging exploration of the causes, meaning and continuing significance of the American war in Vietnam, arguing that the war was not a mistake, or a quagmire but a defining event in global history.
Haunting Legacy
Author: Marvin Kalb
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13: 081572389X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe United States had never lost a war that is, until 1975, when it was forced to flee Saigon in humiliation after losing to what Lyndon Johnson called a "raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country." The legacy of this first defeat has haunted every president since, especially on the decision of whether to put "boots on the ground" and commit troops to war. In Haunting Legacy, the father-daughter journalist team of Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb presents a compelling, accessible, and hugely important history of presidential decisionmaking on one crucial issue: in light of the Vietnam debacle, under what circumstances should the United States go to war? The sobering lesson of Vietnam is that the United States is not invincible it can lose a war and thus it must be more discriminating about the use of American power. Every president has faced the ghosts of Vietnam in his own way, though each has been wary of being sucked into another unpopular war. Ford (during the Mayaguez crisis) and both Bushes (Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan) deployed massive force, as if to say, "Vietnam, be damned." On the other hand, Carter, Clinton, and Reagan (to the surprise of many) acted with extreme caution, mindful of the Vietnam experience. Obama has also wrestled with the Vietnam legacy, using doses of American firepower in Libya while still engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. The authors spent five years interviewing hundreds of officials from every post war administration and conducting extensive research in presidential libraries and archives, and they've produced insight and information never before published. Equal parts taut history, revealing biography, and cautionary tale, Haunting Legacy is must reading for anyone trying to understand the power of the past to influence war-and-peace decisions of the present, and of the future.
Vietnam
Author: Michael Lind
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2013-07-30
Total Pages: 340
ISBN-13: 1439135266
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMichael Lind casts new light on one of the most contentious episodes in American history in this controversial bestseller. In this groundgreaking reinterpretation of America's most disatrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes enduring myths and put the Vietnam War in its proper context—as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Lind reveals the deep cultural divisions within the United States that made the Cold War consensus so fragile and explains how and why American public support for the war in Indochina declined. Even more stunning is his provacative argument that the United States failed in Vietnam because the military establishment did not adapt to the demands of what before 1968 had been largely a guerrilla war. In an era when the United States so often finds itself embroiled in prolonged and difficult conflicts, Lind offers a sobering cautionary tale to Ameicans of all political viewpoints.
The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War
Author: David L. Anderson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2002-07-10
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 0231507380
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMore than a quarter of a century after the last Marine Corps Huey left the American embassy in Saigon, the lessons and legacies of the most divisive war in twentieth-century American history are as hotly debated as ever. Why did successive administrations choose little-known Vietnam as the "test case" of American commitment in the fight against communism? Why were the "best and brightest" apparently blind to the illegitimacy of the state of South Vietnam? Would Kennedy have pulled out had he lived? And what lessons regarding American foreign policy emerged from the war? The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War helps readers understand this tragic and complex conflict. The book contains both interpretive information and a wealth of facts in easy-to-find form. Part I provides a lucid narrative overview of contested issues and interpretations in Vietnam scholarship. Part II is a mini-encyclopedia with descriptions and analysis of individuals, events, groups, and military operations. Arranged alphabetically, this section enables readers to look up isolated facts and specialized terms. Part III is a chronology of key events. Part IV is an annotated guide to resources, including films, documentaries, CD-ROMs, and reliable Web sites. Part V contains excerpts from historical documents and statistical data.
Sources of Vietnamese Tradition
Author: George Dutton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-09-18
Total Pages: 665
ISBN-13: 0231511108
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSources of Vietnamese Tradition provides an essential guide to two thousand years of Vietnamese history and a comprehensive overview of the society and state of Vietnam. Strategic selections illuminate key figures, issues, and events while building a thematic portrait of the country's developing territory, politics, culture, and relations with neighbors. The volume showcases Vietnam's remarkable independence in the face of Chinese and other external pressures and respects the complexity of the Vietnamese experience both past and present. The anthology begins with selections that cover more than a millennium of Chinese dominance over Vietnam (111 B.C.E.–939 C.E.) and follows with texts that illuminate four centuries of independence ensured by the Ly, Tran, and Ho dynasties (1009–1407). The earlier cultivation of Buddhism and Southeast Asian political practices by the monarchy gave way to two centuries of Confucian influence and bureaucratic governance (1407–1600), based on Chinese models, and three centuries of political competition between the north and the south, resolving in the latter's favor (1600–1885). Concluding with the colonial era and the modern age, the volume recounts the ravages of war and the creation of a united, independent Vietnam in 1975. Each chapter features readings that reveal the views, customs, outside influences on, and religious and philosophical beliefs of a rapidly changing people and culture. Descriptions of land, society, economy, and governance underscore the role of the past in the formation of contemporary Vietnam and its relationships with neighboring countries and the West.
Understanding Vietnam
Author: Neil L. Jamieson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2023-11-10
Total Pages: 447
ISBN-13: 0520916581
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe American experience in Vietnam divided us as a nation and eroded our confidence in both the morality and the effectiveness of our foreign policy. Yet our understanding of this tragic episode remains superficial because, then and now, we have never grasped the passionate commitment with which the Vietnamese clung to and fought over their own competing visions of what Vietnam was and what it might become. To understand the war, we must understand the Vietnamese, their culture, and their ways of looking at the world. Neil L. Jamieson, after many years of living and working in Vietnam, has written the book that provides this understanding. Jamieson paints a portrait of twentieth-century Vietnam. Against the background of traditional Vietnamese culture, he takes us through the saga of modern Vietnamese history and Western involvement in the country, from the coming of the French in 1858 through the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Throughout his analysis, he allows the Vietnamese—both our friends and foes, and those who wished to be neither—to speak for themselves through poetry, fiction, essays, newspaper editorials and reports of interviews and personal experiences. By putting our old and partial perceptions into this new and broader context, Jamieson provides positive insights that may perhaps ease the lingering pain and doubt resulting from our involvement in Vietnam. As the United States and Vietnam appear poised to embark on a new phase in their relationship, Jamieson's book is particularly timely.
American Tragedy
Author: David E. Kaiser
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 612
ISBN-13: 9780674006720
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA re-creation of the deliberations, actions, and deceptions that brought two decades of post-World War II confidence to an end, this book offers an insight into the Vietnam War at home and abroad - and into American foreign policy in the 1960s.
Saigon at War
Author: Heather Marie Stur
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-06-11
Total Pages: 295
ISBN-13: 1107161924
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn examination of the political and cultural dynamism of the Republic of Vietnam until its collapse on April 30, 1975.
